It would not occur to anyone at the moment to bring Deutsche Bahn public. Earlier considerations of turning the state-owned company into a stock corporation with mostly private shareholders seem today as if they came from another age. But especially in these days, when it comes to the consequences of the corona pandemic, a little thought experiment is worthwhile.
Assuming that the railway had actually been privatized and is now a completely normal Dax member. Let us also assume that the economic consequences of the pandemic had hit the imaginary private railway just as it is now the real state one. Demand would have plummeted, customers would have stayed away because they feared contagion and didn’t want to visit anyone in the lockdown anyway. A loss of six billion euros would have occurred and the debt would have risen to 30 billion euros.
For a real private company, similar to Lufthansa, the question of existence would have arisen. What would the board of the private Bahn AG have done in such a situation? Probably what others have shown: call unions, banks and politicians together to draw up a rescue plan. That would then demand sacrifices from all involved, from the employees, for example, the postponement of wage increases into the future, from the shareholders a capital cut, from the politicians a capital injection. The unions would fight for the security of their members’ jobs and therefore would agree to victims.
This is where the thought experiment ends and Claus Weselsky and his union of German locomotive drivers (GDL) take the stage. The comparison with an imaginary private railway company makes the whole absurdity of the wage dispute over salary increases clear, which the GDL broke off the fence in the middle of a crisis of historic proportions. It is only conceivable in a state-owned company that cannot go bankrupt. For a while, it even looked as if the first trains were going on strike at the beginning of the holiday season, during which the railway is hoping to win back many passengers lost in the pandemic. Now the GDL has at least waived this gross business damage and announced a ballot for the beginning of August.
True, strikes in such a situation increase the pressure on employers. Only: who are these employers? Board of Management and Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bahn? Of course not. They are the owners of the railway, i.e. the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany, and not only in their capacity as taxpayers. The railways are urgently needed so that Germany can achieve its climate goals, to name just one example. Their existence is secured for political reasons, bankruptcy is beyond any debate. It is from this position that the GDL draws its power. The train drivers hardly have to fear the economic consequences of Weselsky’s actions.
A particular problem is the competition between the unions. With the larger railway and transport union (EVG), which is organized in the DGB, the railway has long since achieved a moderate collective bargaining agreement. The GDL did not want to take over because the offer of the railway was “unacceptable”, in other words: because they dared to strike even more. The competition between trade unions in collective bargaining policy is also problematic beyond the railways. It can lead to privileges for certain professional groups or to a disproportionate increase in labor costs. (A side note on our own account: collective agreements for daily newspapers are usually negotiated jointly on the employee side by the German Association of Journalists DJV and the German Union of Journalists, which belongs to Verdi.)
In the US, on the other hand, some workers do not want a union at all
In 2015, the grand coalition passed a uniform collective bargaining law to limit the competition between the unions. The law, drafted by the then Labor Minister Andrea Nahles (SPD), provides that only one collective agreement applies in each company, namely the one that the union has concluded with most of the members in the company. In the case of Deutsche Bahn, that obviously doesn’t help much, because now the GDL has even more incentives to recruit members and to argue about which of the 300 Deutsche Bahn companies has a majority in which union.
There is a radical solution to the problem in the USA. There, in many states, the employees of a company have to vote on whether they want to have a union at all. To the surprise of German managers and works councils, for example, the workforce at the VW plant in Chattanouga (Tennessee) rejected approval from the US auto union UAW three times. The UAW is heartily unpopular among workers because it was once a major contributor to the decline of the American auto industry. Ironically, they behaved a little like the GDL today. They enforced wage supplements regardless of the rest of the world. Only to find that jobs at GM, Ford and Chrysler could be gone very quickly and that the Japanese and Germans were building cheaper and better cars.
Compared to the UAW, German unions tend to be comparatively rational, apart from the GDL. The fact that there will be no warning strikes next week gives reason to hope that this union, too, has a sensorium for public opinion. One day someone could still come up with the idea of listing Deutsche Bahn on the stock exchange.